https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6569-9527
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Abstract
In a milieu marked by increasing quantification of social life, many digital devices have emerged under the promise of a revolutionary change in areas such as urban planning and governance of Smart City projects. Starting from a pragmatist approach based on Boltanski and Thévenot’s “orders of worth” framework, we argue that the promoters of digital devices must justify their worth by developing “technologies of justification” that go beyond data. In this article, we use a multi-case study of three digital devices—RUBI, Kappo, and Bikelite—for urban cycling created in Santiago de Chile to analyze the material, narrative, and economic technologies of justification mobilized to establish the worth of the data that these devices extract, analyze, and visualize for urban governance. This comparative analysis helps us problematize the homogeneous, neutral, and efficiency-focused valuations that are typically ascribed to these devices by laying out the wide range of operations that are used to justify and secure the embedding of these digital devices in societies. We conclude by offering a series of analytical clues to what may be a new order of worth, or what we conceptualize as the “datafied world.”
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Fondecyt), Ministry of Education, Government of Chile, Fondecyt Grant No. 1180062.
Notes
1 This concept is inspired in part by the work of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) on the mechanics of fact-making, e.g., their comparison of the complex set of technologies deployed by Boyle and Hobbes in the 17th century to secure acceptance of specific matter of facts. The use of “technology” is meant to highlight the fact that all of these devices are tools for the production of knowledge claims and social order.
2 Boltanski and Thévenot (Citation2006) use the term “beings.”
3 These companies are emerging and precarious technological entrepreneurial endeavors. As such, the teams behind these devices tend to be small. We therefore decided that it was sufficient to repeat the interviews with the founders and relevant team members until a dense description of the case was achieved.
4 The technologies are “parts” of the device or apparatus, not an instrument consciously developed by their promoters.
5 https://rubico.org/
6 Sebastián, interview on January 13, 2016.
7 Sebastián, interview on January 13, 2016.
8 Sebastián, interview on January 13, 2016.
9 A colloquial term in Spanish that is given to a person with great experience or who is very knowledgeable about a subject or domain of activity.
10 http://www.kappo.bike/web/?lang=en, accessed on December 25, 2017.
11 In Kappo, “competitiveness” is understood as anything related to cycle sports. However, the tutorial within the app states, "Get motivated by competing with friends and urban cyclists” from other countries. This form of competition is criticised by the Bikelite team for promoting vertiginous and competitive use of the bicycle through the app which can put the lives of cyclists at risk.
12 Iván, interviewed on January 10, 2017.
13 Iván, interviewed on January 10, 2017.
14 Iván, interviewed on January 10, 2017.
15 Iván, interviewed on January 10, 2017.
16 Paulina, interviewed on April 9, 2020.
17 Another example of this is that Paulina travelled to New York for three months in 2017 to learn about its bike lane system. It was there that she discovered the “white bikes” phenomenon, which places ghost bicycles – bikes that have been painted white in locations to commemorate cyclists who have died in road accidents. This had a profound impact on Paulina and led her to create a roadway safety comic called Soul Riders that portrays dead cyclists as superheroes who protect others cyclists.
18 Paulina’s term for apps that only focus on getting to the destination quickly.
19 David, interviewed on April 9, 2020.
20 Cristobal, interviewed on May 12, 2020.
21 The system identifies three types: Bici-angel – experienced female cyclists who help others to ride safely; Bici-mechanics – cyclists who carry patches, wrenches, and other tools to help other users if they have technical issues; and Bici-tracers – cyclists who help the community to register routes and key information for cyclists.
22 https://www.idealist.org/en/days/about (accessed November 29, 2021).
23 Paulina, interviewed on May 31, 2020.
24 According to economic sociologist David Stark (2009), it is precisely this overlapping of multiple evaluative principles that would characterise entrepreneurship and innovative organisations. The challenge is how to organise the “heterarchical rivalry of evaluative principles” to increase organisational reflexivity. For Boltanski and Thévenot (Citation2006), by contrast, beings identified in different worlds or situations of “compromise” tend to be fragile and can break apart. More than settling the discussion, Kappo illustrates how the organisation of several types of worth allows the app to expand its economic relationships with different actors. However, all of these cases remain in a state of fragility.
25 Just as in the case of other self-tracking and self-evaluation devices like Klout, their designers “expect and exploit reactivity” (Gertliz and Lury 2014).
26 This may be due to the generalised nature of digital data suggested by Marion Fourcade and Liam Healy (2016) as “übercapital,” a form of capital that arises from algorithmic classifications and recommendation situations and can be deployed across a variety of domains.
27 Coming back to the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (Citation2006), the critique offered here is similar to that commonly made from the world of fame against the scientists of the industrial world, who are often accused of using esoteric language and isolating themselves from the masses.